Why I am a US Nationalist

Probably the No.1 reason I am not a liberal globalist is that I never went to a selective US college, so I never got the indoctrination and the initiation into the educated globalist elite secret society. Instead I got a Civil Engineering degree at what was then called a "red-brick" university in England. There was no liberal arts curriculum at Brit universities back then to produce well-rounded, i.e., liberalized, STEM graduates as there would be in the United States.

This means that I am an autodidact, one who has educated himself. Indeed, the only time I have taken a course at a university since I graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1968 was a few years ago  when I audited four philosophy courses at the University of Washington: one each in Aristotle, Plato, Kant, and Hume. I took them so I could know the official received version on these greats.

Even without an official government-sponsored minor in ruling-class apologetics I still had conventional liberal ideas when I arrived in the United States. I remember going to a Democratic presidential rally at the Seattle Arena in 1968. And in 1972 I remember watching PBS as they lovingly visited George McGovern at the family ranch in July.

I suppose that my wake-up call was the 60-40 Nixon win in 1972. What was going on when all the right people were for McGovern and the negative income tax?

Eight years later I went to a presidential caucus in Kent, Washington and discovered the folks we would now call the "deplorables," ordinary middle-class Americans, technicians and whatnot, who were alive to Ronald Reagan.

But meanwhile, through reading the Wall Street Journal that was available at the office and its Bob Bartley editorial page, I had learned about Austrian economics and Mises and Hayek.

Did you know that Ronald Reagan, the amiable dunce, left behind him well-annotated editions of Mises and Hayek? Imagine that!

So, ever since, I have been most of the way to being libertarian. But over the years I have slowly grown to appreciate that the thing about the price system and the free market is that there are no safe spaces. Capitalism makes clear, what religion and politics do not, is that we get to thrive in the free market economy only so long as we offer a service that other people want. There is no way that most people are going to be able to graduate from high school, get a job at the plant down the road, and work there for the rest of their lives.

But government is in the protection business, mainly to protect from pirates and plunderers. It doesn't take too much imagination to extend this idea to economic protection, to protect me -- and maybe you -- from the economic hurricane that might appear one day out of a clear blue sky. And people want safe spaces.

The very idea that government could protect from economic vicissitude is new. In the old days, when nature delivered a drought or a flood there was nothing to be done: people starved. It wasn't until the 19th century that it became possible, with steamships and railroads, to move grain in quantity from the abundant to the starving areas of the world.

But there is another reason for government to provide economic protection. It is that most financial crises and panics are a precipitate of government economic policy. Crash of 1873: result of deflation after the civil war. Panic of 1907: result of Alaska gold rush supplying gold (and thus credit) during the time of the Gold Standard. Deflation of 1920s and 1929 Crash: result of governments deflating after World War I and clumsily trying to fix the problem. Crash of 2008: result of government forcing mortgage issuers to lend to bad credit risks. So yeah. Given how government economic policy can ruin peoples' lives, there oughta be a safe space.

In general, governments don't have a clue what they are doing. They are, indeed, armed minorities occupying territory, taxing the people to reward their supporters and borrowing to fund their wars. So when they make a mistake, as they usually do, they have a duty of care, to look after the people whose lives they ruined.

At least, in say the United States, when the people get pissed off with the follies of the current lot they can throw the rascals out and let the other guys have a go.

But with supra-national organizations that option is not available. This has two bad effects. The first problem is that the bureaucrats and failed politicians that run them are not looking over their shoulders to wonder what the political backlash is likely to be. The second problem is that, when things go wrong, the bureaucrats and time servers do not really represent anyone but themselves. This last fact was illuminated by the classical scholar and politician Enoch Powell when he said that the European Union could not work because there was no European demos, no European people.

Powell was saying, in other words, that  a government must be associated with a people, and feel itself responsible to that people, and look to that people for its support, and its cannon fodder in time of war. Now, if you are part of the global elite you do in fact experience the EU bureaucrats as representing you. I  remember attending an engineering conference in Davos, Switzerland, in 1990. It was telling that all the European scientists there seemed to have grants from the EU: their kind of people.

Now, in the good old days of tribalism, and even of feudalism,  the Big Man of the tribe and the feudal lord indeed did lead a people. But feudalism fell to the absolute monarchs, who learned how to disarm their nobles, make them into courtiers, and fund their states not on the revenue from the royal estates but by taxing commerce. They learned to fund their wars by borrowing from a commercial sector anchored by a central bank.

In nationalizing their nobles, the absolute monarchs also nationalized their peoples. It was, of course, a cultural aggression. England colonized and nationalized Wales and Scotland, but failed to nationalize Ireland. The Île de France around Paris colonized and nationalized the rest of France. The Prussians manipulated the rest of the German princes into wars against Denmark, Austria, and France, and unified the German Nation as a result. With Italy, the folks around Tuscany colonized the rest of Italy and Sicily, and the southerners are still not too happy about that.

What with a war or two, here and there, most people in Europe came to identify with their nations more than their old region. Look at Germany the other way up. It is astonishing that Hitler was able to lead the Germans, unified into a single nation for only 65 years, into a war to end all wars in 1939. How did he do it? He persuaded the German people that they were a German people rather than Prussians and Bavarians and Rhine-Palatinatians.

Now in my view the globalist agenda to denormalize the nation state and replace it with global governance and identity politics is a bad idea. First of all, the only globalist demos is the upper class that swims across the world between corporate and academic NGO gigs. Everyone else is a deplorable, and need not apply for full citizenship.

Secondly, I think that the identity politics of class and race and gender and large-scale immigration promoted by the global elite is a deadly virus that is killing the nation state. Well, you may say, and a good thing too, given the record of aggressive nationalism, fascism, and wars between nation states.

And what is your cunning plan to replace the nation state, Baldrick? Global governance? Gender politics? Safe spaces? A global ban on cultural appropriation?

Let us merely remember Winston Churchill's dictum:

Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

Let us merely adapt this dictum. The nation state is the worst form of state organization, except for all the others.

The astonishing success of the nation state consists in this: it has successfully engaged peoples' loyalty away from their family, race or tribe, which is the natural way in which humans identify themselves, and directed it towards a totally artificial and fake abstract concept: the nation, which is unified by its language.

Of course, the nation state is a shameful thing, born in aggressive conquest of neighboring principalities, completed in cultural linguistic domination over regional dialects and cultures. And its economic hegemony over its people, by commandeering up to 50 percent of their income for use in buying the loyalty of its supporters, is monstrous.

But the alternatives! Our big problem these days is that, in its campaign to weaken the idea of the nation state the educated ruling class has strengthened the idea of race and region, encouraging people to identify with smaller cultural units than the nation state.

In my view, all the proposed alternatives to the nation state are roads to ruin. And that is why I am a US Nationalist.

And that is not to say anything about our national heroes: Washington, the man on the white horse that went home rather that appointing himself president-for-life; Hamilton, the man that founded the US economy and inspired a musical; Lincoln, the reluctant warrior; Coolidge, the mild man from hard-scrabble Vermont; Reagan, the amiable dunce that won the Cold War without firing a shot.

Sorry if your hero didn't get a mention.

The Three Forms of Social Control

The biggest takeaway in Jordan B. Peterson's 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos is the lobster story. Even the lefty Cathy Newman had to take a rest from her "so what you are saying..." shtick and its mis-characterization of Peterson's ideas to ask about that. It is an argument against the fantasy of equality. Lobsters, he relates, have a hierarchy. It is built into their DNA (or their brain stem or something) and it works with the chemical serotonin.

And what is the purpose of this hierarchy in lobsters? It is to prevent violence among the lobsters.

The point that Peterson wants to make is that inequality, hierarchy, pecking order, are not just oppressive, exploitative, and evil. They really have a purpose, even way down the animal kingdom with primitive animals like lobsters.

The point, I suppose, is that if you are going to impose equality it is going to take force. So, Kemosabe, your equality program is going to replace a concept that is universal in the animal kingdom, because it reduces the resort to force, with a forcible imposition of equality from the top? How does that compute? And how, anyway, do you get equality when some monarch at the top, with his pure and devoted henchmen, is going to have the power to impose equality on everyone except himself and the henchmen? Sounds like good old lobsterian hierarchy to me.

So I take away from this the notion that all politics and culture and social cooperation is a means of reducing force, starting with the most  primitive of all culture, the pecking order.

Obviously, the simple pecking order is not the answer to all our social cooperation problems. In his Why God? Rodney Stark provides two improvements on the simple hierarchy. One is "informal social control;" the other is "formal social control." His line is that informal social control is appropriate for the small face-to-face community, but that when humans started assembling in larger communities we needed something else. Enter the monotheistic religions with their doctrines of good and evil, gods with their divine law, and rulers and priests that dispense formal justice.

But also, I realize, informal social control continues in a condominium with formal social control. I realize this from James M. Ault's Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church. Ault reports that in the fundamentalist church he researched all the offices were held by men but the whole religious community was run by the wives of said men, because of their influence in the women's gossip network that gets to define  "a common grid of 'what everybody sees' and 'what everybody knows.'" This, in my opinion, is the good old informal social control now integrated with the formal social control institutionalized in the fundamentalist church and its rigid rules and roles.

My point here is to realize to myself that informal social control and formal social control are not separate; it is not the case that formal social control, required because of the growth in size of human communities, has replaced informal social control. Instead the patriarchal formal social control sits on top of the older informal social control and augments it. In fact, I would guess, under normal circumstances the informal social control network pretty well runs things. Only when some big issue arises, or some rupture of the normal women's common grid occurs, does the formal social control network swing into action. One of the ways in which this occurs is when there is a critical mass of young men in a city not yet assimilated to the city culture that forms criminal gangs and requires a countervailing force of city policemen.

Note that our liberal friends are also invested in the formal social control concept. Their model seems to be for the formal social control structure to completely take over society, replacing family, church, and also the market with a single total political and administrative structure. Run by them.

But what do we call the market relationship? I propose that we call this "indirect social control." Let us suppose that informal social control is the women's gossip network that regulates ordinary face-to-face social relations. Let us say that formal social control is a patriarchal hierarchy that defines good and bad and takes care of egregious bad actors that are not amenable to the influence of the women's network. But the operation of the market system is obviously something else again. And yet it involves both face-to-face relationships of the informal social control culture and also the rules and regulations of the patriarchal formal social control culture.

And something more. This something more is the influence of the price system which is an independent influence in addition to the relationships of face-to-face and the rules of commercial law. I would say that it is a third level that sits on top of the rules of formal social control that sits on top of the relationships of informal social control. The influence of the price system is indirect. It is a moment to moment commentary on transactions; it is constantly nudging everyone to serve each other; and it is constantly issuing balance sheets that tell us what is working and what is not working in the moment to moment pecuniary transactions of life.

Let us now take a further step and say that we humans have a tendency to plump for one or other of these cultures of social control and "privilege" it over the others.

Right now we have the educated women of the world that are intent on privileging the informal social control culture of women: they want to anathematize "microaggressions" and provide "safe spaces." This is such a girl thing! Then we have the lefties of the world that want to privilege the formal social control of the educated expert in top down government and administrative bureaucracy then reorders the world in accordance with the lefty vision of equality, liberation, and emancipation. Such a boy thing! Finally we have the libertarians that want a market-only regulation of society with the price system determining everything.

But I am better, higher than all this flat-earth fol-der-ol. Well, of course.

I see above the dusty plain to the mountains and above them to ridges higher still! What is needed is all three of these methods of social control, with the patriarchal formal control incorporating and extending the matriarchal relational social control, and the market's indirect social control incorporating and extending the patriarchal formal social control system. And beyond that, who knows what some genius is presently cooking up to amaze us all with a fourth system, higher and better than anything we can presently understand.

Now, in my view this Three Cultures notion dovetails brilliantly into my reductive Three Peoples concept. Of course it does. But that is a question for another post.

Who Will Be the Angriest of All?

I get that the whole point of politics is to get your side angried up so that they will all go out to the polls and vote.

That, I presume, was the whole point of Al Gore not conceding the 2000 election and the subsequent Redefeat Bush bumper stickers on the backs of Subarus everywhere for the next few years.

And that, obviously, is the plan with Hillary Clinton's Russia Collusion excuse for losing the 2016 election.

But I thought that the candidate's lawyers were off-limits. That's so that all shady deals can be run through the candidate's lawyer's office. See the Steele Dossier, for which the financing was run through Hillary Clinton's lawyer.

But with the raid on Donald Trump's lawyer I'd say that the good old rules are finished. Apparently, a special team will go through all the documents to determine which are covered by attorney-client privilege. Perfectly fair and just. But I doubt if Hillary Clinton would like any government  team rummaging through her attorney's files on such a mission. After all, it's nothing to exempt evidence because of attorney-client privilege if your gum-shoes have already been through it all and understand what has been going on and where the bodies are buried.

But the question that I have about all of this is: who will get the angriest? Will it be Trump supporters enraged that, yet again, the Deep State gets to do what it wants when it wants and how it wants? Or will it be educated women confirmed once again in their outrage that Trump has been #MeToo-ing around when everybody knows that the Harvey Weinstein era is over?

Or do the Trump supporters, content with the good-jobs regime of the Trump economy stay home while the woke SJWs all flock to the polls?

The simple answer is: we don't know. All I know is that I put out a substantial contribution to Dino Rossi, who's running for the open Republican toss-up WA-08 district. The last time I got that engaged, and put up real money, was in 1994 in the great mid-term that elected the first Republican Congress in 40 years. And what got me all riled up was the hypocrisy of the 1992 Year of the Woman.

So the question in 2018 is: who is angriest? Is it the lefty liberals, outraged at the inexplicable election of Trump when everyone agreed it was time for the First Woman President? Or is it the deplorables, enraged at the manifold injustices and indignities that they receive every day at the hand of the their local liberal?

You call it.

Sure We Fight, But Then What?

Right now the mad-caps on the conservative right are all singing the same tune. First the liberals want to take our guns and then they want to take our free-speech rights. #1A and #2A.

OK, so we fight. We fight for our gun rights, and the right of self-defense. And we fight for free speech rights; the right to publish our ideas, right and wrong, and petition the government for a redress of grievances, right or wrong.

But then what?

See, my Big Thing is that we conservatives really don't have an answer to the left's program.

The left, as I see it, is filling the hole left by the death of God in the 19th century. But its program is totalitarian: we will bend the arc of history towards justice with a condominium of secular religion and government power and economic power.

The verdict on that is the mass graves of the 20th century. When ideology, government, and economic power are condensed into one entity the result is disaster.

But people still want the consolation of religious hope; they still want government to protect them from pirates and predators, and they still want economic security. And that is the package deal that the left keeps offering. And that is the attraction of "activism" for the well-born crusader. He can be the agent to bring hope and safety and security to the eternally marginalized.

In his Maps of Meaning Jordan B. Peterson tells us exactly what this is about. We live in the Unbearable Present; our constant need is to formulate a solution to this misery, to heal the gaping wound in our society and advance to an Ideal Future.

You will notice that the left has exactly formulated its program on this axis whether with the unbearable exploitation of labor or minorities or women. And they formulate a vision of an ideal future, liberated and emancipated from oppression and exploitation.

Only the left always leads to the silence of the mass grave. So something is wrong.

Peterson symbolizes the problem of redemption from the unbearable present to an ideal future as the opposition between two Hostile Brothers: the Hero and the Adversary.

[The hero] stands on the border between order and chaos, and serves the group as creator and agent of renewal... The hero rejects identification with the group as the ideal of life, preferring to follow the dictates of his conscience and his heart. His identification with meaning--and his refusal to sacrifice meaning for security--renders existence acceptable, despite its tragedy.

But then there is the Adversary. He comes in two forms, the fascist and the decadent.

The fascist wants to crush everything different, and then everything. The decadent immolates himself, and then builds the fascist from his ashes. The bloody excesses of the twentieth century, manifest most evidently in the concentration camp, stand as testimony to the desires of the adversary and as monument to his power.

The problem is, of course, that every self-styled savior represents himself as the true hero, and the other guy as the fascist, decadent adversary. So how is a mother to tell the difference? How do we identify the false hero, who is really a fascist in disguise? How do we see the heroism in the man that "everyone" calls a fascist?

In our current world we have the globalists, who see themselves as arching above the fascist tendencies of the nation state. Then we have the nationalists that see themselves as representing the only practical form of large-scale human representation, because, to paraphrase Enoch Powell, globalism cannot work because there is no global demos, no global people: thus all current attempts at supra-nationalism must fail. Then we have the left that experiences itself as the voice from below, giving voice to the silenced, the oppressed and the exploited.

Which of these is the hero, and which the adversary?

That is the great question of our time.

Women, Kevin, Can Be As Mean As Pepper

Right now I am struggling with the assertion in Jordan B. Peterson's Maps of Meaning that the Great Mother represents both creation and destruction. We seem to be getting all Hegelian here, where a thing is the same as its opposite, or very nearly.

But really? Women are destructive?

You see, I am really your average squish and I have been taught to be a gentleman, where women are concerned. So I find it really difficult to deal with the idea of women as destructive.

So you can imagine that I am really interested in the travails of Kevin D. Williamson and the women of The Atlantic. Here is a good set of links from PowerLine. Is the defenestration of Kevin the answer to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything where women are concerned?

Could it be that women are not the innocent virgins and suffering mothers of legend?

You think?

Don't forget the fact that the main actors in all those religious witch-hunts of which we've heard tell were women.

And there is the fact reported by James M. Ault Jr. in Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church. Men hold all the offices in these racist, sexist, homophobic churches, but women control the church through manipulation of their office-holding husbands. How? Well in part it is because the women's gossip network creates "a common grid of 'what everybody sees' and 'what everybody knows.'" In other words, women get to define social reality through their daily conversations and interactions with each other.

Hey, here is something more, that I just read yesterday. It's the lament of a "really beautiful woman" about how hard life has been for her. It's not the men that make it rough. Oh no. It's the women that all hate her.

One of the worst things about being beautiful is that other women absolutely despise you. Women have made me cry my whole life. When I try to make friends with a woman, I feel like I’m a guy trying to woo her. Women don’t trust me. They don’t want me around their husbands. I’m often excluded from parties, with no explanation.

Well, bust my buttons! Who knew?

So really, why be surprised that the women at The Atlantic all ganged up on poor Kevin Williamson. It could not be, it must not be that a man who was adopted as a baby -- and therefore might easily have been aborted, but wasn't -- would have strong feelings in a pro-life direction with respect to abortion.

No! Not to be endured! Nobody is allowed to to tell well-born women the facts of life. After all, what is the point of being a well-born woman working at a prestige media title unless you can define the common grid of what everybody sees and everybody knows, and make it stick.

Oh, and in the same week we have the kerfuffle at YouTube, run by Susan Wojcicki, who is connected with the founders of Google. The problem at YouTube seems to be that while conservatives and alt-right whackos kinds expect to be demonetized and censored, immigrant Iranian women vegans get really angry! How dare anyone censor them or demonetize them? What about their rights!

So here's the basic facts of life from Jordan B. Peterson, as I understand them right now, to help it all make sense.

First of all, our modern scientific world view, of facts, facts, facts, has nothing to do with the case. We do not go through life making rational decisions based on data input and strategic processing of data. Not at all. We -- and all living things -- live moment to moment on auto-pilot, flying along as unconcerned as a seagull. But then something unexpected happens. Enter fear. It means that you have to suspend auto-pilot, stop your life right there until you can figure out what happened and why, and figure out how to deal with it. Until then, you are paralyzed with fear. Reason has nothing to do with the case. It is emotion that rules the world.

In a societal context, where a whole society has been rocked on its heels by an unexpected event, the problem can only be solved by a "sacrificial hero," who does the work of figuring out what happened and how to change society so that it can deal with the new and the unexpected. As we know, these figures are only venerated when they have departed the scene, often tragically. Think Lincoln, JFK, Martin Luther King, Jr. Or, if you are a lefty, Rosa Luxemburg, Sacco and Vanzetti, Trotsky, the Rosenbergs, Che.

Really, if you want to make a difference, you probably have to die upon the Cross.

But this is not the way of women, as The Atlantic has just demonstrated. And this is not surprising. Women are the agents of creation and destruction; it is men that are the agents of order and tyranny, and specifically restoring order after the lingering death of tyranny, which is the world of the dying king, holding on to his throne with white knuckles while the world crumbles around him.

You can see this in the way that political scientists frame presidential elections. Elections are either Four More Years -- a continuation of order -- or Time for a Change. Time for a Change tells us that the voters think that the order of the previous regime has tended towards tyranny and the political order must be refreshed. That is a man's job. It cannot be the job of people that insist on their safe space and the exclusion of all discouraging words that might upset them.

Meanwhile, our liberal women friends like Jennifer Palmieri are still emoting about the idea of a woman president.

Only thing is that the great women political leaders of our time, Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher, pretty well reinvented themselves as men. Theresa May and Mutti Merkel, not so much.

Because the job of a political leader is not to cuddle in a safe space but to boldly outdare the dangers of the time, the eternal black cloud of the Dragon of Chaos. And that is what men were put on this Earth to do. Women? Not so much.

The Plague of Fake Politics

When you are part of the ruling class -- or even a ruling-class wannabe -- you want to do ruling-class things. And what a ruling class does is politics.

In our age the ruling class is the so-called educated class that first emerged in the Enlightenment and first got its hands dirty in the French Revolution. Then, in the 19th Century we saw the emergence of Educated Youth, the Marxes and the Engels of the time, well-born young men that chose politics as a way to advocate for the lower class.

Thus was born today's over-under politics where the wealthy and the well-connected use the underclass as a tiger-paw to maul the middle class. Marx was the son of the best lawyer in Trier and Engels was the son of a textile baron sent to England to keep an eye on Daddy's business.

The thing is that this sort of politics is fake. Marx and Engels were not advocating for the rights of well-born scions, they were advocating for the workers. Er, what would rich kids like that know about the needs of the workers? Because the telling thing about Educated-Youth activism is that it seems to require All Power to the Scions! In our day we are talking about graduates of selective colleges making their chops as "community organizers" for a year before moving on to a liberal foundation and then a career in electoral politics. Fake politics is great for the well-born scions. And that is the point.

So now we have the fake "caravan of Central American migrants" organized by the usual crew of liberal church groups. Sorry fellahs, but glomming onto a group of Central Americans and using them as camera bait is not "activism;" it is fake politics. It is US liberals looking for an issue on which to perform activism and create meaning for themselves.

And the same goes for the March for our Lives movement that features the teenagers from Parkland as its media bait. Kids don't have the experience and the connections to mount huge rallies in Washington DC. It takes well-connected professional activists and well-connected billionaires. It is fake politics. It is not about "gun violence," which is mainly a problem in black inner cities; it is all about creating meaning in the lives of well-born, well-connected liberals: fake politics.

Next week is going to be Town Hall for our Lives, featuring the same stand-up kids in front of cameras. Sorry liberals; this is fake politics, once again.

If all this stuff is fake politics, what is real politics? I will tell you. It is some whacko guy running for president and discovering a whole demographic that none of the fake activists had ever thought of representing.

The problem with all this educated-class fake politics is what comes later. It is what I call the "little darlings" problem.

Suppose you are Marx and Engels and you want revolution for the working class. Or you are Beatrice Webb and you want legislation mandating labor unions and social services for the working class. Just trust us, they said, and we will change the world for you and protect you.

Only they didn't. Marx and Engels and their adepts Lenin and Stalin and Mao and Castro and Chavez led the workers into a maelstrom of starvation and killing. Beatrice Webb and US liberals led the workers into a box canyon by promising cradle-to-grave jobs and welfare. But now the working class in England and the US is dying of despair because the world they were taught to live in has collapsed. Go watch the Up Series if you want to see this happen in real time. There are no more lifetime jobs in manufacturing; there are no more secure union jobs except in government. The glorious movement to lift up the working class was not about the working class at all; it was all about the power and the glory of the Marxes, the Lenins, the Webbs, and the college-taught "activists" luxuriating in the activism culture of today.

The same thing has been happening with the women's movement, run by well-born women that fancied a life that was more than marriage and children. No problem, girls, except that, for some reason, the women of today are less happy that the women of the Fifties. Why would that be? Could it be that most women -- well-born women educated at selective colleges excepted -- want marriage and children and a part-time job? Has anyone asked them?

Here's what I keep coming back to. It is that, in this age of politics-with-everything we have grasped the wrong end of the stick. The record of the last 200 years is that the day-to-day work of human social cooperation can best be left to the market in goods and labor, with sensible laws to encourage faithful dealings and reward trust. It is not a good idea to marshal people into political tribes and teach them to trust their leaders. Political leaders are like the generals of armies. They get to go home to a well-earned retirement; it is their foot soldiers and caravaner migrants that get to pay the bills of their leaders with their lives.

Instead of teaching gullible teenagers and migrants to trust in their leaders we should be teaching people to understand and master the bourgeois bargain. The bargain is simple: it is your job to figure out how to contribute to society with your mind and your body, and then do something about it. And don't think that the job is over once you have found your first job. The world changes, and we all need to change with it, or else end up on the dust-heap of history. Sure, "society" can help, and government has role to play. But what if the government is wrong? What if government's health care programs make health care impossibly expensive?  What if government schools don't prepare our children for the real world? What then?

There's a cute piece today by Christopher DeGroot, who sneers at Kevin D. Williamson for sneering at the white working class for not getting with the program and doing something about it when the good old jobs started to fade away.

The problem is that the white working class made its mistake a generation before the jobs started drying up in the Seventies. Their mistake was the trust the activists of fake politics who "cared about people like you."

No they didn't. All politicians care about is your vote. All the activists care about is your body showing up at their "peaceful protest." And that is all.

What Do We Do About the Experts?

I was recommended to read The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor by economics professor William Easterly.

Easterly tells a story familiar to the rebels that don't like being dictated to by the educated elite. The way of the world is for the best and the brightest to decide what is good for us, and then implement it, for our own good, of course.

Easterly approaches the issue with a review of development economics, the notion that experts and administrators know how to bring the backward nations of the world into the modern age with targeted plans formulated and executed by a central government advised by international experts.

On Easterly's telling, this all began a century ago at the intersection of economics and colonialism. The western colonial governments were starting to get a bit uncomfortable with the western domination of the rest of the world. How did democracy and self government mesh with the colonial domination of Africa and Asia? The answer was a clever one.

The backward people governed by the western colonialists were really too backward to be able to govern themselves and come up with ideas and plans for their own development, so the answer was for autocratic governments, colonial or post-colonial, to execute on economic development plans developed by European experts, the chaps who knew what they were doing. Politics was the answer.

It actually makes a lot of sense. If you are the ruling class the last thing you can countenance is to get up and abandon the levers of political power, and say to yourself, OK, our rule is unjust and we should just get the heck out of here. Instead what you do is elide the truth of your unjust rule, and perform a misdirection play. You say to yourself and to the world that, well, these backward people aren't really interested in political rights. So the best thing to do for them is to implement a targeted plan of economic development created and executed by us, the knowledgeable ones.

This is smarter than you might think. It appeals to the existing colonialists, and it appeals to any budding local nationalist revolutionary cadres. It flatters liberal reformers and it sidesteps the whole question of political legitimacy. Thus, between the world wars, there was a big effort to come up with a development plan for China, in which both the Rockefeller Foundation and Sun Yat-sen/Chiang Kai-Shek supporters collaborated. It conveniently dropped the question in which ordinary Chinese people were intensely interested, of western enclaves in China where western law superseded Chinese law.

Or in Africa, the colonialists came up with development plans after World War II to benefit "the natives" without really tackling the who-whom question of whether the western colonialists should be the ones to dictate such matters.

Of course, there were people that questioned the technocratic development model, and Easterly frames this opposition in the contrast between the two winners of the 1974 Nobel Economics prize,  F.A. Hayek and Gunnar Myrdal. Hayek is famous for his opposition to the expert technocratic model; Myrdal was a full-on supporter of the technocratic model. But guess what: the technocratic model enthusiasts refused to engage with the Hayekians, saying that everyone agreed that the technocratic model with its carefully-crafted plans was the way to go. Somehow that sounds familiar.

In other words, people in the political world cannot coutenance anything unless it is a political solution, directed by the powerful. We know what is best, say the colonialist oppressors; We know what is best, say the post-colonialist autocrats. And why not? If you have managed to get yourself to the top of the political heap, you must be a genius, right?

No doubt, but what is interesting me, at the half-way point in the book, is that Easterly is carefully making his case on the argument from racism, that the western colonialists and experts were and are racists that operated on the assumption that ordinary people in the Third World just did not have the chops to develop their countries on their own.

But I want to make the problem bigger. After all, the whole point of the western welfare state is that ordinary western people just don't have the chops to manage their retirement, their end-of-life health care, their children's education on their own. They need the support of technocratic government programs.

I suspect that Easterly will get around to that, but he understands that to persuade the political and cultural elite he must argue from racism and not from economics.

For the extraordinary Great Enrichment of the last two hundred years took place in spite of everything and everybody. In my view nobody knew what was happening in the west 200 years ago, and if they had they would have stopped it. Ruling classes want to rule, and that is all. Ordinary people want to hang on to what they have, and that is all. Both are lemmings, that keep on going until they go over the cliff.

We have increased per-capita income by 30 times in 200 years, yet we can still get a Venezuela. How come?